Sunday, October 09, 2005
Jeff Gannon PLAGIARIZED WSJ
Jeff Gannon never saw any freakin' internal government memo and just straight out plagiarized The Wall Street Journal when he asked Joe Wilson his infamous question.
If everyone in the blogosphere wants to keep believing otherwise and go crazy over this Joe Conason Salon article, it would be prudent to at least acknowledge my argument.
The Wall Street Journal article wasn't published until October 17, 2003 and Talon News posted the Jeff Gannon interview on October 28, 2003.
Susan G. (who I - otherwise - respect, love and admire) wrote a diary at Daily Kos which points to a Jeff Gannon blog posting in which he wrote that he "confronted Wilson about it in a September 2003 interview."
But, as MKT notes in a comment left on that diary, a month later, Jeff Gannon left this response to a reader on his comments thread:
"Actually, I first began speaking with Ambassador Wison [sic] in September 2003. A formal interview was conducted in October 2003."
I left a comment, as well ("still say it's plagiarism"), in which I basically broke down the article I wrote on February 22nd:
Check out how Gannon ripped off nearly every single word from the WSJ:
Gannon: "An internal government memo prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel details a meeting in early 2002 where your wife, a member of the agency for clandestine service working on Iraqi weapons issues, suggested that you could be sent to investigate the reports. Do you dispute that?"
Cloud: "An internal government memo addresses some of the mysteries at the center of the White House leak investigation and could help investigators in the search for who disclosed the identity of a Central Intelligence Agency operative, according to two people familiar with the memo. The memo, prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel, details a meeting in early 2002 where CIA officer Valerie Plame...a member of the agency's clandestine service working on Iraqi weapons issues, suggested at the meeting that her husband...could be sent to Niger to investigate the reports."
The phrase "prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel, details a meeting in early 2002 where" wouldn't have been in the memo and Gannon completely plagiarized that...and I'm highly doubtful that Cloud plagiarized that part from whomever might have "told" him to write it.
And if Talon News saw the memo....how come they didn't write an exclusive story before WSJ?
As MKT notes below...Jeff says the interview began in September and was completed in October.
All I have to add is that I do believe that Jeff Gannon came up with the word "dispute" for his question, all on his own (jeff the journy rules!)
This is the article that I posted on February 22nd (link), and two days later David Corn "discovered" the plagiarism and wrote it up at The Nation.
A reader named Margaret e-mailed me a very significant example of out-and-out plagiarism from a real live news organization that may have serious ramifications for ex-"journalist" Jeff Gannon.
No. You can't go to jail for committing the crime of plagiarism. But, in this case, you might be committing a major crime if you lie about it.
During Jeff's interview with Joe Wilson (the former U.S. diplomat whose wife was outed as a CIA operative by conservative writer Robert Novak, a possibly illegal action which is believed to have been prompted by the White House in order to get back at an editorial Mr. Wilson wrote for The New York Times), Mr. Gannon took one of his questions directly from a Wall Street Journal article written by David S. Cloud (WSJ cache and MND link , and in case the latter link disappears here's a cache snapshot taken by Light In The Darkness) and, yes, if it's that internal memo question:
Gannon: "An internal government memo prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel details a meeting in early 2002 where your wife, a member of the agency for clandestine service working on Iraqi weapons issues, suggested that you could be sent to investigate the reports. Do you dispute that?"
Cloud: "An internal government memo addresses some of the mysteries at the center of the White House leak investigation and could help investigators in the search for who disclosed the identity of a Central Intelligence Agency operative, according to two people familiar with the memo. The memo, prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel, details a meeting in early 2002 where CIA officer Valerie Plame...a member of the agency's clandestine service working on Iraqi weapons issues, suggested at the meeting that her husband...could be sent to Niger to investigate the reports."
Many of us bloggers have wondered why Jeff Gannon danced around the issue of whether or not he had somehow seen an "internal government memo" in an argument about why he was subpoenaed at the Free Republic Website (Justin Raimando even mentioned the WSJ article in this article on Gannon but he didn't quite add it all together) and, after resigning from GOPUSA, in an interview with Editor and Publisher: "I am not going to speak to that. It goes to something of a nature I do not want to discuss."
Jeff's "nature" is that, aside from anything else, he is a plagiarist and he couldn't very well come out and cop to that and admit that he never saw shit.
So if Jeff Gannon really told the FBI agents who came to question him about his perceived involvement in the Plame affair that he couldn't reveal his sources, he committed the serious crime of lying to federal agents since he had no sources, not one. And I'm not a lawyer (nor do I play one on this blog) but I think Jeff might also be committing the crime of impeding a federal investigation.
Will there be futher repercussions? We'll see.
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